The New Normal and Partnering with Adobe Marketing Cloud

The digital era came with a lot of promises, like measurability and the road towards impactful ROI. The idea was to gain an evergreen set of channels to grow the business and evolve everyday. The reality is that budgets allotted towards marketing are now more about feeding those channels to keep them alive and at times, in a half-assed manner. To even have a semblance of the a chance in the new normal, marketers have to continuously work in an ever shifting balance between speed, cost, flexibility, brand, compliance and security. Every time we take on a new campaign or micro-site, its a chance to suffer from the same resonating eight pain points:

consistency of brand message

time to market

too many vendors

resource & budget constraints

digital asset management

mobile first, responsive design

targeting and data management

actionable insights

Fight or Flight?
Today, campaign plans comprise of three common steps – ideation, realization and engagement/execution, with a 30%, 50%, 20% brain focus division among them. We need to move away from realizing a small set of ideas and create an open space to bring in new ideas and engagements. A lot of our work at Ephlux has been project based, wherein we would come into a customer’s online marketing efforts – build & design a website, their apps and eCommerce micro-sites and the engagement ended. In the world that was five years ago, even clients we have on retainer, that was a perfectly acceptable way to work. Digital allows you to have a continual relationship with customers and as such, companies like Ephlux need to remodel the relationship with clients that is more durable so now we’ve adopted what Professor Sasha Strauss refers to as the “New Normal” with a more flexible and always on approach towards clients, the same relationship we advise them to undertake in brand strategy. And this is why we reached out to partners like Oracle and Adobe in order to reach better outcomes and drive the digital engagement landscape like never before attempted.

Since partnering with Adobe, our approach towards overall campaign value proposition has changed dramatically. We now have a division dedicated towards campaign formulation, execution and analytics. The tools from our partners provides a better way for us to design and execute campaign properties and micro-sites as part of the overall campaign model broken down as follows:

a. Strategy

Media Plan

Customer Targeting

Site Design

Social Strategy

b. Demand Generation

Media Buying

CRM Activation

Site Configuration

Social Activation

c. Analytics & Optimization

Media Optimization

Customer Analytics

Site A/B Optimization

Social Analytics

We’re using Adobe Experience Manager in essentially a PaaS (platform as a service) format that enables rapid deployment of responsive design campaign and micro-sites. With more and more marketers driving home the idea of customer experiences 24/7, off & online, we believe the partnership with Adobe technologies will enable smart content marketing and campaign management for immediate test and target capabilities on campaign sites and explore new avenues in the digital landscape.

About Umair Khan

Umair heads application development teams at Ephlux. He specializes in eCommerce strategies for high-tech and industrial clients and consults on product strategy and the transformation of core innovation processes.

Faisal Ali Shaikh

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